Reform UK scored its first victory in a London borough by-election on Thursday, capturing the suburban Bromley Council ward of Bromley Common & Holwood. The result is a significant milestone in London’s electoral history and a portent of what might happen in some boroughs in the May 2026 full London local elections that will delight Nigel Farage, whose house in the village of Downe is in an adjacent ward.
Bromley Common & Holwood ward stretches south and slightly east from Bromley town centre, following the A21 road on its way out of London and the A233 that branches off it. The inner part, around the neighbourhood of Bromley Common, is the most metropolitan section of the ward, with its district centre around Chatterton Road and reasonably convenient commuting from Bromley South station.
Further out there is part of the Southborough residential area, the new Trinity Village development and the eastern part of Keston, Keston Mark. Some of the avenues around Keston Mark are extremely plush, but the premier property in the ward is Holwood House which sits in its own 40-acre private park.
Holwood was the home of Prime Minister William Pitt, although the current house dates from after his time, Pitt’s residence being demolished by an unsentimental later 19th Century owner. The house is currently on the market, so it could be yours if you can come up with £21 million plus Stamp Duty.
Bromley Common & Holwood’s suburban composition means it has high levels of owner occupation (70 per cent) and professional and managerial occupations (42 per cent, compared to 31 per cent in England). Seventy-seven per cent of the population is white, which is high for London but a little below the England average.
The current ward is the successor to the previous Bromley Common & Keston ward, which was cut back to give part of Keston to the neighbouring Hayes & Coney Hall, where there was a by-election in December 2023. The ward based on Bromley Common has tended to be safe for the Conservatives, who polled 57 per cent of the vote there in 2018, although UKIP got 23 per cent in 2014.
Going back further, the Liberal Democrats (and predecessors) had seats in the ward from 1986 until 2002, but their support has faded this century. Helped by the boundary change,s Labour trimmed the Conservative majority considerably in the May 2022 elections, but the Tories still finished comfortably ahead.
The by-election arose from the death of incumbent councillor Jonathan Laidlaw, a long-standing local resident who worked as a financial planning consultant. He was first elected to Bromley Council in May 2022 as a Conservative, but left the party group in August 2023 to sit as an Independent. Although he did not sign up for the party, his sympathies were with Reform UK and he attended several of their branch meetings. Conservative council leader Colin Smith and all the main political parties in Bromley expressed their condolences.
Candidates came forward from the five main political parties. The Conservatives selected Ian Payne, who represented Chislehurst from 2010 to 2018 and was Mayor of the borough in 2016-17. He had worked as a town centre manager and as a Salvation Army minister. Alan Cook, the Reform UK candidate, had been their parliamentary candidate for the Bromley & Biggin Hill constituency in 2024 and was selected as the Brexit Party candidate for Old Bexley & Sidcup in 2019 until the party stood down its candidates in Conservative-held seats.
In the intervening period, Cook joined the Tories for a spell before concluding that, in his words, “the global socialist view over the national one was always going to win” within the party. Cook is an IT consultant and former banker.
Elizabeth Morgan, who has worked in finance and technology and is raising her young family in the ward, stood for Labour. The Lib Dem candidate Laura McCracken works in the fintech industry and has lived in several of the world’s major financial centres during her career. She is a former Conservative who became disillusioned with the party over Brexit and its turn towards populism. Ruth Fabricant for the Greens has been an early years teacher, a contrast with the IT and finance backgrounds of the other candidates.
The Conservatives threw everything they had at this by-election, with CCHQ staff and party members in London urged to help and a polling day visit from Kemi Badenoch. It is unusual for party leaders to join parliamentary by-election campaigns let alone contests for local councils.
But it was all to no avail. Payne won 1,161 votes (29 per cent), but his Reform rival Cook (pictured) was the winner with 1,342 (34 per cent). Depending on how one calculates percentages in multi-member elections, the Conservative share of the vote was down by either 12 or 18 points on where it was in May 2022. Even on the less dramatic basis it was their third-worst result in London since the general election.
Morgan for Labour was third (720 votes, 18 per cent). This was a drop of 10 percentage points, but less than the average of 16 per cent the party has suffered in London by-elections in 2025 so far. Labour’s strength in Bromley has been gradually increasing as the demography of the borough has changed, and this relatively light beating at a time of great unpopularity for the party of national government might be another indicator of the underlying local trend.
The Lib Dems were fourth and the Greens brought up the rear. Turnout was 28 per cent, not far down on the 32 per cent in the ward in the full borough elections in May 2022.
The number of Reform borough councillors in London now stands at four: Alan Cook joins three colleagues who have defected from the Conservatives – Mark Shooter and former council leader Dan Thomas in Barnet, and Laila Cunningham in Westminster. Reform also has one Assembly Member, Alex Wilson, another former Tory, who was elected from the Londonwide list last year
In some ways the landmark result was to be expected. Although Reform has been leading national opinion polls for some time and scoring victories in local elections outside the capital, the right combination of circumstances and location had not yet cropped up in Greater London.
Now it has. Bromley is just across the boundary from Sevenoaks, where Reform won four out of six Kent County Council divisions in May’s May elections and parts of the borough – certainly including Keston and Holwood – look towards Kent, whose county council is now Reform-controlled. If Reform was going to break through in London, it was probably going to be on the Kentish fringe, if not in Bromley then in neighbouring Bexley.
The Bromley Common & Holwood result does not suggest that Reform is going to sweep London in the May 2026 borough elections. The share of the vote and the margin of victory were not of landslide dimensions. Other by-elections in less propitious wards and boroughs have shown no sign of the party breaking out of the 10-20 per cent range, a share of support that is useless from the point of view of winning council seats.
However, Reform should comfortably top UKIP’s high-water mark of 12 London borough seats in the 2014 elections and stands a chance of winning a majority in at least one borough (Bexley). We will get another straw in the wind next week, when Labour defends a seat in Barking & Dagenham.
Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky.
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What has it come to when these kind of people win?